A new church web site idea: don’t let anyone in but members, and greet every visitor with a big “DONATE NOW” button?
I truly don’t mean to criticize—I want every Bible-teaching church to be successful in advancing Christ’s kingdom. But I’m really curious: am I just missing something?
A new edition of the GNT for the digital age. Unicode, no DRM.
And, at last, a printed GNT with sharp, beautiful typography? We’ll see.
HT: Rod Decker
Christians have memes. At least American evangelical and fundamentalist Christians do, and I imagine we’re not alone. A meme is “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.” (Don’t hold it against the poor little word, but it was coined by Richard Dawkins.)
So we get this idea that the high priest had a rope tied to his ankle so that if he died in the Holy of Holies people could pull him out. Not true. A mere meme. Spread, who knows how, throughout the believing community.
If you’ve read this blog for long, you’ll know that I think “love is an action, not a feeling” is another unjustified meme.
Not that all memes are wrong. I suppose “God hates the sin but loves the sinner” would be an example of a meme that carries significant truth (John 3:16) without exactly coming from Scripture. Like any slogan, its virtue is brevity, and it can therefore be misleading (see Psalm 5:5, where God says He hates the wicked). But its brevity is still virtuous.
One of the more recent memes goes like this: “I don’t want a red-letter Bible, because I don’t accept the implication that Jesus’ words are somehow more divine than the rest of the words in Scripture.”
Granted. Some people have really thought things like this—“Red-Letter Christians,” they’re called. So this meme carries a significant truth: Jesus’ words are from God, and so are Paul’s and Moses’ and even Samson’s.
But I still like my red letters. They’re visually convenient without adding typographical clutter. They help my reading and preaching, because they enable me to look across a two-page spread in Matthew and tell immediately where Jesus is speaking. They orient me on the page, helping me follow the discourse.
They are one reason why the Sermon on the Mount has made such an impact on me. As a kid I noticed that Matthew 5–7 was the longest stretch of red in the New Testament. I thought that was neat, so I read that stretch.
Let’s not let this meme go too far.
I got Freakonomics (something fun for me and wife to listen to) and Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, something by a major secular church historian I thought I ought to stay aware of.
John Frame’s tetralogy is about to be completed. The Doctrine of the Word of God (DWG) is, according to one person who seems to know, supposed to be released next month.
That means you need to go to this page immediately and download the pre-release PDFs of DWG, because they will be taken down once the book is released.
That’s just what happened with The Doctrine of the Christian Life. The PDFs are worth having because it makes your paper copy searchable and copyable.
If I were a broader reader, I would have the right to say what others do: Frame is one of the most balanced and helpful theological writers out there. All I’m qualified to say, however, is that he has helped and balanced me.
HT: Brian Collins
News Flash: The new NIV update will be available for online reading Nov 1.
Anecdote: I learned a lesson a few years ago from one of my teachers. The ESV Study Bible had just come out, and I was as excited as the rest of the miniscule portion of the blogosphere that I happen to inhabit.
My excitement was largely justified: the ESVSB is a great resource. Beautiful, sound, massive.
But one of my seminary professors didn’t seem so excited. He wasn’t dismissive either. He was—get this—actually reading the thing! Before he recommended it or not, he wanted to read it, and read it all. Crazy! The whole Reformed blogosphere already pronounced it bless-ed! Why actually read it?
I took a lesson from that. He didn’t find much he objected to, a couple finer points of eschatology I think. But I knew I should be more like him. So, for instance, I read Republocrat before puffing (or criticizing) it. And now I hope to read this new NIV for myself.
J.D. Crowley, God-glorifying missionary to Cambodia, has preached two excellent messages in the Bob Jones University chapel services these past two days.
Here’s the first one. He said it all so well and illustrated it so wisely (and, at times, hilariously!). I can hardly imagine it being improved upon, especially for the setting in which it was preached.
But what’s more important is that he rung the changes, as they say, on some sound scriptural emphases that I have found to be excellent food for my own soul:
Well, at least two of those are sound scriptural emphases I feast on. But all three are in the sermon. You simply have to listen.
Ok, one more point so I can remember this for myself. Crowley said that the animistic worldview in Southeast Asia is based on karma: you do good, you get good; you do bad, you get bad back. So he has spoken to Cambodians who have watched the Jesus Film and come away saying, “That must have been one wicked man if he died like that.”
You simply have to listen!
I’ve been digging into an old debate for my dissertation, the one between intellectualists and voluntarists. There is considerable variation in each category, probably more in the latter, but there are some common threads in each.
Basically, intellectualists think that the reason should (or does—there’s one significant variation) lead the human person, telling the will what to do. Voluntarists feel (ahem!) that the human will guides the person: you always do what you want.
That’s a two-sentence summary of a lot of material, and, frankly, I feel like I’m still only on the edge of really understanding all of this.
But let’s take two worldviewish claims from the NY Times and examine them quickly from the two perspectives:
The editors at Snopes.com, in an excerpt I’ve quoted before:
Especially in politics, most everything has infinite shades of gray to it, but people just want things to be true or false…. In the larger sense, it’s people wanting confirmation of their world view.
The author of an article on Islam and Christianity:
Why do people tend to hear only one side of the story? A common explanation is that the digital age makes it easy to wall yourself off from inconvenient data, to spend your time in ideological “cocoons,” to hang out at blogs where you are part of a choir that gets preached to.
Makes sense to me. But, however big a role the Internet plays, it’s just amplifying something human: a tendency to latch onto evidence consistent with your worldview and ignore or downplay contrary evidence.
Both of these secular people are sounding the same note, one that can be harmonized with either an intellectualist or a voluntarist perspective.
Intellectualists would tell such a person that they shouldn’t let their affections direct their thinking. Approach a topic dispassionately, objectively. Try to eliminate heart motives altogether. As long as you have all the facts and the necessary brain power you’ll come out right.
Voluntarists would tell such a person that until they get their affections directed appropriately—until they love the right things—they will never really think rightly. Christian voluntarists would say that the fear of the Lord is the very beginning of wisdom. In other words, the “principal part” (רֵאשִׁית) of right knowledge is an affection, a heart direction: fearing the Lord.
I think that presuppositionalism tends to fit better with a voluntarist paradigm. You don’t know the truth because you’ve suppressed it; you’ve suppressed it because your deeds are evil and you want to keep doing them.
Intellectualism, I think, leans toward an evidentialist apologetic: let’s come and reason together; if I can just get you to see the facts in their proper relationships, I’ll persuade you to see the truth of what I’m saying.
I think God authorizes (and models in Scripture) both approaches. Paul uses evidence when he appeals to eyewitnesses in 1 Cor 15 as proof of a major gospel proposition: Christ was raised from the dead. And Solomon evokes presuppositionalism when he says that real knowledge doesn’t even start until you fear God.
I won’t overtly take sides at this point; I’ll only note that your inclination toward either evidentialism or presuppositionalism may come from a prior commitment to intellectualism or voluntarism.
Keep thy heart with all diligence; For out of it are the issues of life. (Proverbs 4:23)
This is a very common memory verse, as well it should be, but how many people know what issues means here? It doesn’t mean what we would usually expect that word to mean in a sentence like this one, “a matter that is in dispute between two or more parties” (Merriam-Webster).
I gather from the Hebrew word and an OED check that the KJV translators used issues to mean something more like “out-goings” (the OED offers, “the action of going, passing, or flowing out; egress, exit; power of egress or exit; outgoing, outflow,” and it attests this use in Wycliffe as early as 1382). Modern translations tend to use “springs” in this verse—“out of your heart flow the springs of life.” In other words, what happens in your life flows out of your heart (cf. Waltke, NICOT, p.298).
Today we tend to use the verb form of issue to mean something like “out-goings” when we say, “Senator So-And-So issued a press release.” And when we say, “There’s a new issue of TIME you’ve got to read,” we are using the noun in a way that stems from the “out-goings” sense—because a press issues or sends out each print run. (This connection, however, is not present in our minds when we use the word.)
But I don’t think very many people at all today use the noun form of issue in quite the way the KJV did in this verse. Yes, you got the gist of Proverbs 4:23, but are you content to memorize a verse in which you don’t really understand one of the major words?
And archaic usages in the KJV do create problems. I went to a funeral a few years ago where an old African-American preacher preached on “the woman with the issue of blood” from Matthew 9. He began something like this: “This woman had an issue—an issue of blood. I got issues, you got issues, we all got issues!” Yes, we can blame this man for poor exegesis, but his use of a 400-year-old translation certainly didn’t help.
